Ice Wolves by Amie Kaufman

Sun, 25 Mar 2018 21:00:37 GMT

Published: March 2018 by HarperCollins
Format reviewed: ARC Paperback, 335 pages
Series: Elementals #1
Genres: Fantasy, middle grade
Source: Publisher
Reading Challenges: Australian Women Writers Challenge 2018
Available: Abbey’s ~ Amazon ~ Barnes & Noble ~ Book Depository ~ Booktopia ~ Dymocks ~ Kobo

Disclaimer: I was provided with a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Everyone in Vallen knows that ice wolves and scorch dragons are sworn enemies who live deeply separate lives.

So when twelve-year-old orphan Anders takes one elemental form and his twin sister, Rayna, takes another, he wonders whether they are even related. Still, whether or not they’re family, Rayna is Anders’s only true friend. She’s nothing like the brutal, cruel dragons who claimed her as one of their own and stole her away.

In order to rescue her, Anders must enlist at the foreboding Ulfar Academy, a school for young wolves that values loyalty to the pack above all else. But for Anders, loyalty is more complicated than obedience, and friendship is the most powerful shapeshifting force of all.

Amie Kaufman is well known for co-authoring some of the most highly regarded series in YA, notably The Illuminae Files with Jay Kristoff and Starbound with Meagan Spooner.Ice Wolves marks her first solo novel and she shakes things up further by aiming it at a middle grade audience.

The story is told in close third person, focusing on Anders. He lives on the street with his sister Rayna and they steal in an effort to keep themselves alive and fed. Anders is a sweet boy whose conscience leaves him uneasy about the way in which he and Rayna make ends meet. He’s also not very good at it, relying on his more headstrong and capable twin to do much of the heavy lifting. So, when she accidentally transforms into a scorch dragon and is abducted by other dragons, he feels lost.

However, he quickly finds himself swept up by other companions. Having himself turned into an ice wolf–the shapeshifters that enforce law and order in Holbard and defend it from the dragons–he is taken into Ulfar Academy to be trained. I feel that any post-Hogwarts magical academy has to work hard to get away from those associations and, for the most part, I feel like Ulfar Academy accomplishes that. However, it is made more difficult by Lisbet, the Hermione Granger of Ulfar Academy. She is one of the first ice wolves Anders meets and forms part of the small pack he joins. Throughout the story, she shows herself to be a loyal friend. Being an intelligent girl, she’s quick to figure out the adults aren’t telling them everything and, as a consequence, spends a lot of time in the library and snooping around.

The representation throughout the book is reasonably well handled. Despite the medieval-ish, slightly Norse feeling of the setting, the cast is reasonably diverse. Anders and Rayna are both people of colour and there are a variety of skin tones among the rest of the cast. Same-sex relationships are casually mentioned among the adults. And the gender balance remains relatively even, with women included in positions of power. There’s also some discussion of class issues. It takes Anders some time to get used to having all his basic needs met by the academy and I enjoyed seeing him adjust. Life at the academy has also required some adjustment for his pack member Viktoria, who came from a wealthy family and now has to learn to do things for herself.

Although it was a competent story, it was also fairly predictable. There’s nothing ground-breaking or surprising here. However, this is perhaps a forgivable flaw given the target audience.

Overall, I found Ice Wolves an entertaining but ultimately forgettable book.

Mirrored from Earl Grey Editing.

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A Voyage Through Air by Peter F. Hamilton

Sun, 03 Sep 2017 22:01:05 GMT

Published: July 2017 by Macmillan Children’s Books
Format reviewed: Paperback, 336 pages
Series: Queen of Dreams #3
Genres: Fantasy, Middle Grade
Source: Publisher
Available:Abbey’s ~ Amazon ~ Barnes & Noble ~ Book Depository ~ Booktopia ~ Dymocks ~ Kobo

Disclaimer: I was provided with a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
This review contains spoilers for previous books.

War is coming–and every leader of every realm has sided with the War Emperor and pledged to fight the Karrak invaders–apart from Taggie, the teenage Queen of Dreams-to-be. Aided by an unusual band of allies, including a Karrak Lord, an elf and a feisty skyfolk captain, Taggie knows that the only way to stop the war is to find the long-lost gateway between our universe and the dark universe: the home of the Karrak people. But how much is Taggie willing to lose in her desperate quest for peace?

A Voyage Through Air is the final book in the Queen of Dreams series and is a suitably epic conclusion.

It’s not a book that stands on its own, particularly since it carries on more or less immediately after the previous book. There’s a bit of recap, but it’s hard to say how effective it is. By the time A Voyage Through Air starts, there’s a reasonably large cast, containing both ongoing characters and some new faces, and it could be a lot to process for younger readers. I’d definitely recommend starting from the beginning of the series and enjoying all the fun.

Taggie and Jemima, two sisters from the ordinary world, are in fact royalty in another realm. Upon taking up her rightful throne, Taggie faces an assassination attempt by a previously-unknown cousin. This was part of a large-scale plot to assassinate the princes and princesses of all the magical realms. The Kings and Queens blame the Karrak Lords, denizens of a dark universe who were trapped in our light universe a thousand years ago. They decide to go to war, but Taggie is determined to find a peaceful solution. A Voyage Through Air centres on her quest to accomplish this by locating the hidden gateway between the universes.

The worldbuilding is more whimsical than realistic. The First Realm, where Taggie rules as the Queen of Dreams, is an inverted sphere with land around the outside and the sun in the middle. While it’s nice to see an imaginative new take, sometimes I felt that differences existed just for the sake of being different. This was particularly the case with the elves and the dragons of the world. For example, the dragons found in the Realm of Air look significantly different to the popular conception of dragons (being described as more like giant manta rays with two tails) and refer to themselves by a completely different name. It therefore seems strange to tie them to dragons at all–which the narrative does by presenting them to the sisters as dragons and repeatedly affirming how much the creatures hate being called that.

The changes to the elves make a little more sense, pushing back at the traditional uptight, milk-white portrayals. However, this is undermined somewhat by a lack of diversity in the remainder of the cast. Captain Rebecca is introduced in A Voyage Through Air as a dark-skinned skymaiden–the first the reader has seen. In fact, she’s the first dark-skinned character at all, apart from the elves, making it feel tokenistic. It really is too little, too late.

The story itself is an epic adventure, as the sisters and their friends attempt to retrace the course their ancestors took a millennium ago. There are air ships, monsters and battles on the land and in the sky. The narrative occasionally gets bogged down in description, but the style is nicely visual and is aided by a few illustrations scattered throughout the book. The language may be a bit of a challenge to younger or more inexperienced readers, but I’m not a good judge of that.

It is a good book for readers who aren’t fond of romance. There’s some in the background for Taggie, but it’s generally downplayed. Instead, the focus is on friendship and adventure.

All in all, I found A Voyage Through Air a light and reasonably entertaining read.

Mirrored from Earl Grey Editing.

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Calissa

Ice Wolves by Amie Kaufman

A Voyage Through Air by Peter F. Hamilton